Bill Johnson

Johnson: Panda nonprofit gets a chance to paint Times Square black and white

By Bill JohnsonDenver Post Columnist

Posted:
08/15/2011 01:00:00 AM MDT

She spends many of her weekends the way she did a couple of weeks ago.

Suzanne Braden grabbed a tent, her husband, Jerry, a pile of brochures and a big box of stuffed giant pandas and sat in the heat during the dragon boat races on Sloan's Lake.

She is director of Pandas International, a Littleton-based research and preservation nonprofit she started in 1999 after a visit to a panda reserve in southwest China.

There she learned that scientists estimate the population of giant pandas at less than 1,600, making them the most seriously endangered species in the world. On the flight home, she decided she needed to help.

At the lake, as people stopped by, she told them of the pandas and of her work. She raised maybe $2,000.

Last Thursday, though, she was about to take her mother for a doctor's visit when the telephone rang.

She shook her head and wagged a finger after her mom answered it, silently telling her to say she was not home. Her mother was insistent.

It was CBS. Suzanne Braden, 61, took the receiver.

They made her an offer.

A group had purchased a 15-second spot on their "Super Screen," the giant, 520-square-foot Trinitron on 42nd Street in the heart of Times Square in New York. The network, however, had rejected the spot because of its content.

Normally, such ads, which run between segments promoting CBS' programs, cost $50,000.

"I kept listening," she would later say.

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The network, however, had made a decision to give away the slot to a nonprofit. But they wanted it to go to an animal group, the cuddlier the better.

A producer who was in on that meeting immediately mentioned Panda International. In her phone call, media director Robin Atha told Braden she could have the spot for only the cost of producing it, or about $13,000.

It would run on the Super Screen 18 times a day for 45 days, they told her, or a total of more than 800 times. It would be seen, they estimated, by about 1.5 million people each day.

Suzanne Braden nearly cried. And she immediately went looking for $13,000.

"There are more than 500 nonprofits in Colorado, alone, so you can imagine how many there are in the country. Yet they selected us," she said over lunch, dressed as almost always in a panda print shirt. "I don't know who that producer is, but he clearly is our guardian angel."

Publicity — public awareness, they call it — is mother's milk for every nonprofit. Braden and her small board of directors in those early years were mostly sputtering along.

And then, in 2008, a massive earthquake struck Wolong, a tiny village in Sichuan province, home to the panda research center, the conservation facility where Braden first fell in love with the animals.

For more than a week, she was interviewed by every major news outlet in the U.S. and Canada, and she traveled with NBC News to Wolong to report on the quake for the "Today" show and the "Nightly News."

Panda International, in the space of those first 72 hours, raised more than $100,000 for tents, sleeping bags, dried food and truckloads of medicine for people in the area.

Its profile grew. Fundraising was no longer just a wish.

She has been back to Wolong every year since 1999. Her organization is now working with local farmers to replenish the bamboo fields wiped out by the quake and other natural disasters.

She is hoping the Times Square spot will provide the big public-awareness boost she has long sought. It was scheduled to begin running this morning.

By late last Friday, Braden had not slept the previous 24 hours, or since her mother had picked up telephone.

"Putting together a 15-second spot, I must tell you, is really, really hard, harder than you can ever imagine."

People will see it and, she hopes, people will donate. There are incubators for panda cubs that need purchasing, milk and medicines to buy.

"People," Suzanne Braden said, "may see what I have, that giant pandas truly are magical beasts. These last two days, they have been magic."